Why has public belief in universities been haemorrhaging?

Stephen M Gavazzi and E Gordon Gee, What’s Public about Public Higher Ed? Halting higher education’s decline in the court of public opinion. Johns Hopkins University Press (2021). ISBN: 978-142-144-2525.

The red flag went up on page five, when Stephen M Gavazzi and E Gordon Gee wrote that their research was underwritten by a grant from the Charles Koch Foundation. Founded by oil man Charles Koch, the foundation is famous for its libertarian views and for supporting the Law and Economics Center at George Mason University in Virginia, which hosts corporate-backed ‘free market’ educational workshops for federal and state judges and attorneys general.

Koch money also supports a number of libertarian think tanks, one of which is a ‘bill mill’ that drafts bills such as the infamous ‘bathroom bill’ that would ban transgendered people from using female washrooms, which are then distributed for proposal by Republicans in state legislatures.

According to Greenpeace, between 1997 and 2008, organisations funded by Charles and (the late) David Koch spent more than US$145 million attacking climate change science and proposed solutions.

Each chapter of What’s Public About Public Higher Ed? begins with an epigraph drawn from writings of, or speeches by, Abraham Lincoln, which serve as exemplars of the chapter’s argument. The (apocryphal?) quote: “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time,” nicely sets up their discussion of national university rankings.

Their commentary epigraph for the second chapter, which is about the necessity of moulding public sentiment in order to get anything done, misfires badly. They are correct that Lincoln’s words were spoken during a debate with Senator Stephen A Douglas. But the occasion was not the “outset of his [Lincoln’s] campaign to become president of the United States”.

Rather, on 21 August 1858 Lincoln was running for Senate from Illinois. While Lincoln lost the race that November, the Lincoln-Douglas debates did make him something of a national figure. Yet, as the election of 1860 approached, he was far from being the front runner for the Republican Party’s nomination.

Gavazzi and Gee are on stronger ground when, in the chapter that explains the creation of the Morrill Land Grant universities, they quote from Lincoln’s 1859 speech to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society in which he praises the “capacity, and taste, for reading [which] gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others... It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the unsolved ones [problems]”.

Signed into law in July 1862, the Morrill Land Grant College Act authorised the federal government to gift land to the states, which could be developed or sold to establish public universities. The first was Kansas State University established in 1863. Later ones include West Virginia University (1867), where Gee is president, and three years later Ohio State University (1870), where Gavazzi is a professor in the department of human sciences.

The land grant universities are traditionally considered one of Lincoln’s signature accomplishments, outside, of course, of leading the Union to victory in the Civil War. More recently, however, historians have stressed the racism at the heart of the Morrill system. The millions of acres the federal government gave the states came largely from land seized from Indian tribes, existing treaties in some cases notwithstanding, a fact Gavazzi and Gee do not even nod towards.

The ‘tyrannies’

In the first chapter, Gavazzi and Gee recycle Ronald Reagan’s most Koch-like sentence, albeit without attribution. Towards the end of their discussion of what they call the “tyrannies” (a loaded term that needs no comment from me) that they believe hold universities back from adapting to 21st century challenges – the department structure, gerontocracy of faculty, complacency and the political echo chamber of “left-leaning ideologies” – they take a swipe at expertise. “We are the experts of our academic areas, so we know what to do,” they assert, which rings as hollow as (Reagan’s quip): “We’re from the government, and we’re here to help.”

If the vacuousness of Reagan’s words wasn’t apparent during his presidency, as we near the second anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s not too early to recognise that governments trying to help is no bad thing. The blithe dismissal of expertise of academicians may sound like fun if you are talking about a Marxist literary critic, but today, after months of the Republicans dismissing expertise, it rings rather hollow.

As for the “echo chamber”, the most obvious American example is not the academic conference circuit and most-read journals. Rather, it is on the political right, with Fox News being at the nexus.

Given Gavazzi’s and Gee’s dismissal of ‘expertise’ early in the book, it came as a surprise that they did not propose an alternative curriculum. Indeed, at no point do they actually criticise the choice of a novel, a textbook, a syllabus or a hidebound department that needs breaking up.

A survey drives the book

Instead, the fundamental driver of each chapter is the survey results from 844 participants, 344 male and 500 female. Some 79% were white, 57 were Hispanic, 52 African American while the rest were of Indian, Asian American or of Hawaiian descent.

Twenty-eight percent had either graduated high school or left before doing so. Another 29% had some university or community college experience while the rest, 366 respondents or 43%, had either a bachelor degree or more.

To test their respondents’ views on where publicly owned colleges and universities should be putting their money, Gavazzi and Gee gave each participant a budget of $100 and asked them to allocate between teaching, research and community outreach. Almost everyone allocated more than $45 to teaching, $28 to research and the rest to community outreach.

In practice, only 25% of public universities’ budgets is allocated to teaching which, the authors note, is possible only because of low-paid, non-tenure track, adjunct faculty whom they dub the “worker bees” that teach the majority of courses.

The authors’ critique of the funds spent on research, about 11% in reality, is that contrary to the hype, it simply doesn’t pay for itself. Indeed, following Professor Christopher Newfield of the University of California, Santa Barbara –who, it is fair to say, is significantly to the left of the Kochs – they argue that even when government money is factored into the equation, universities lose $24 for every $100 “gained in external grants”.

This shortfall is one of the major contributors, the authors argue, to the steep rises in tuition over the past few decades. (As we will see in a few moments, Gavazzi and Gee are silent on the public policy choice that most critics point to as the main reason for skyrocketing tuition.)

Urbannormativity

About halfway through the book, we are told that 71% of their respondents think “there should be no difference between how rural and urban communities are prioritised” by state governments that govern public higher education. A few pages later, however, in what seems at first to be an even-handed analysis, Gavazzi and Gee argue that rural communities and students are devalued because of “urbannormativity”. The term, which I must admit I had never seen before, is central to the work of ‘critical rural theorists’, likewise, a group I had never heard of.

Given the debates in the United States over Critical Race Theory (CRT), actually, screeds from the likes of the Republican governors of Florida and Texas and scores of (mainly) rural Republican politicians across the country, it was beyond strange to find that academics concerned with the plight of America’s rural areas have co-opted not just the structure of critical race theory, but also the initials of ‘CRT’. As Oscar Wilde observed: “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”

Gavazzi and Gee quote from Dr Kathleen Gillon, professor of higher education at the University of Maine, to underscore the point that by adhering to urbannormativity, colleges frame higher education “primarily as an urban matter” reserved for urban residents.

There are two problems with this claim. The first is that state universities and colleges tend to be in small cities and towns spread across the length and breadth of the 50 states. The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, for example, is in a city of fewer than 125,000 residents; almost all of the 14 small universities and colleges that make up the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education are in small cities or towns with names like Edinboro, California, Lock Haven and Mansfield.

Secondly, since more than 80% of Americans live in urban or suburban districts, it is hardly surprising – or undemocratic – that the default ethos of publicly paid for goods like public higher education would be suburban and-or urban.

Nor is one of Gavazzi and Gee’s key examples of urbannormativity without problems. They point to the professors at State University of New York’s campus in the small town of Oneonta (13,079) who – even as they use the small state university as a stepping stone to a position at one of the more prestigious campuses – choose not to live in or around Oneonta because it is “in the middle of nowhere”. Instead, we are told, these professors live in the suburbs of Albany, Utica or Binghamton.

At the risk of being dismissed as a New York-born and bred snob, it is worth pointing out that the ‘suburbs’ of Albany, the state’s capital with a population of 99,224, as well as those of Utica (65,288) or Binghamton (48,000) are hardly chi-chi places like Manhattan’s Greenwich Village or Soho, or Brooklyn’s Dumbo district. What we are looking at here is an example of how Gavazzi and Gee err when defining the categories in this chapter.

A global footprint

The chapter that will most interest readers of University World News concerns how Gavazzi and Gee’s respondents rated the importance of state universities having a global footprint. A greater percentage of white respondents thought international and local issues should be equally emphasised by public universities, whereas a majority of ‘non-white’ respondents thought global issues should be emphasised.

Other slices of the respondent pool were within a few points of each other: Republican/Democrat, and conservative/liberal. These results ran counter to Gavazzi and Gee’s hypothesis.

There is no significant body of research that demonstrates the value-addition of having a global footprint, for, according to Dr William Brustein, vice president for global strategies and international affairs at Eberly University in Morgantown, West Virginia: “This is a neglected area because it’s not the sexiest aspect of university work on the global stage.”

This absence makes it all the more difficult for public universities to convince their state government masters of the value of a university in, say, the middle of Kansas or Tennessee, having its own foreign policy, so to speak.

The trick to getting politicians in capitals like Des Moines in Iowa, Boise in Idaho, Pierre in South Dakota or Cheyenne in Wyoming on board is to convince them that the pay-off of international education is not immediate (save, of course, for the higher tuition fees international students pay). Rather, it is a long-term strategy that has less to do with the much-touted educational advantages of having international students on campus than with the fact that it is fundamentally mercenary.

Gavazzi and Gee advise college presidents to tell state politicians that the benefits accrue from having a network of alumni who have returned to their home countries and can help sell the state’s goods in their countries or regions. The lack of moral statements about creating world citizens etc may alarm, but it is almost refreshing to see such steel-eyed realism about what interests policy-makers at the state government level.

Race and class divides

America’s racial and class divide shows up starkly in the chapter that considers merit-based versus needs-based financial aid. In Gavazzi and Gee’s discussion, one can detect a whiff of Koch’s ideology. They are correct that for decades there was bipartisan support in state capitals for public universities. However, Gavazzi and Gee elide the facts when they write that “this rather copious amount of overall public support provided to those who would seek a college degree may be eroding”. As a university president Gee knows that funding eroded almost a decade and a half ago.

In the year following the onset of the 2008-09 recession, state governments cut their grant per student from an average of $9,124 to $8,363, and the following year cut another thousand dollars. Only in 2019-20 did the dollar figure return to 2009 levels; accounting for inflation, this still represented a more than 10% cut.

No state has made a real effort to make good on the cumulative figure of $7,364 per student that its state system of higher education lost in the decade ending in 2019. Not only do Gavazzi and Gee fail to include these numbers with the welter of statistics they do provide, but they let the state off the hook for the skyrocketing tuition costs over the past decade and a half. Plugging this gap would require raising taxes, something the Kochs and their allies oppose whether they are paid by individuals or, especially, when paid by businesses.

Gavazzi and Gee’s survey found that Republicans supported merit-based financial aid while Democrats favoured needs-based aid. In terms of aid granted by universities, the percentages of who receives each type of aid is similar, between 13% and 14%. What differs is the amount of the cheque: students receiving needs-based aid collect on average $3,600 per year, while those receiving merit-based aid collect $5,200 or 20% more.

If we look at recipients of direct aid from the states, the figures on who receives aid are reversed. More than 20% of the students receive needs-based aid of $3,400 while merit-based aid goes to 4.4%, with grants averaging $2,700. The sentence that comes after this explanation of state aid is, “Here, then, we see a rather significant skew towards needs-based aid from state governments both in terms of the number of students receiving such aid and the amount of that financial assistance.”

However technically correct the word “skew” might be, if they were discussing the slope of this data plotted on a graph in the sentence just quoted, “skew” has a pejorative connotation. It strongly suggests a negative value judgment about, in this case, the fact that the majority of aid goes to students in need.

Further, it is notable that Gavazzi and Gee never acknowledge that study after study has shown that students who come from families with financial means score higher on standardised tests and do better in school, not to mention the fact they tend to go to better schools. All too often merit-based financial aid is but a premium paid to those who already have financial means and have benefited educationally from them.

A page later, in their analysis of why young people favoured needs-based financial aid, the authors quote Winston Churchill, who allegedly said, “If you are not a socialist when you are young you have no heart, and if you not a conservative when you are older you have no head”.

They follow the quote by writing that “younger citizens have a greater stake in lifting those people least able to afford a college degree, whereas older citizens are a bit more circumspect, wishing to have universities balance their distribution of internal funding more equally between those who most need it and those who have demonstrated the greatest abilities”. This sentence follows the logic of the quote which, incidentally, can be traced back to the French politician, Anselme Polycarpe Batbie, who was also an academic; it became public when his letters were published in 1872.

The first part of Gavazzi and Gee’s sentence, “younger citizens …” speaks of youthful idealism. The second part parallels the “head”, where (supposed) cold hard facts are validated by reason and experience. One can almost hear Gavazzi and Gee chortling at the notion that the idealism of the young who want to lift people up will be replaced by the jaded views now held by their elders.

How the public views higher education

In the book’s final chapter, after convincingly calling for university presidents to get out more and spend time with regular folks, so they can hear for themselves the local population’s concerns, hopes and dreams, Gavazzi and Gee turn to the debate about how higher education as a whole is viewed by the divided American public. A slight majority believe it is important, a drop of 19 points in six years. In 2017, fully 58% of Republicans had a negative view of higher education and how it contributed to the nation’s problems.

At the heart of this discussion is an interview with Dr John Barnshaw, a research affiliate at the College Crisis Initiative. Barnshaw told them that “the Republican party had already lost the millennial generation because millennials have been ‘pushed to the left by their professors’". In 2016, the realisation of this fact led the drafters of the 2016 Republican platform Donald Trump ran on to include a plank calling for colleges and universities to avoid “political indoctrination”.

Barnshaw’s point about the Republicans having lost the millennials was accurate in the last federal election cycle as 65% of the youth cast their ballots for Joe Biden. Yet, what is really telling here is Gavazzi and Gee’s rhetorical strategy. Barnshaw’s words about university students being politically indoctrinated by the left, the words’ authority heightened by quotation marks, are the only ones on the table for us to consider.

Both Gavazzi and Gee know that Republicans and others made the same complaint about university students in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Yet, as soon as they’d handed in their last essays replete with approving references to Karl Marx, Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida, these cohorts applied en masse for jobs on Wall Street or later to the companies that grew wealthy during the dot-com boom.

Gavazzi and Gee let Barnshaw’s claim stand uncontested, it seems to me, because at bottom, they view professors who teach their students to think critically about American society and capitalism as doing something that approaches being illegitimate. It’s doubtful that they would say the same about the pro-business and anti-government regulation professors at George Mason University’s economics department and law school.

For the Koch brothers donated $100 million to the school, most of which was divided between the economics department where libertarian-leaning economics is now the dominant school. Tens of millions of the Kochs’ dollars, together with an anonymous donation of $20 million, led the university’s law school to change its name to the Antonin Scalia Law School, commemorating one of the most conservative United States Supreme Court justices in American history, who died in 2016.